by John Osborn
The Municipal Building Committee voted yesterday to recommend to the Board of Selectmen that the town replace the current octagonal addition on the north end of town hall with a new one, but with dimensions more modest than the most ambitious addition it has considered.
The vote of the five members was unanimous, and followed a presentation by Drayton Fair of LLB Architects, the committee’s design firm, which showed that the price of renovating the existing structure would be greater than that of tearing it down and rebuilding a new one from scratch. But as the proposal is refined over the next few weeks, the total size and cost of that addition is likely to be debated at length.
The committee had already chosen a design for the remodeling and expansion of Hildreth House at its last meeting in December.
The Thursday evening decision is a major milestone for the building committee, and is the culmination of work begun by an earlier committee two years ago. Town Hall, which was built in 1872, is in serious disrepair. Hildreth House is in much better shape, but with the number of seniors in town expected to rise quickly over the next few years, the Council on Aging and its supporters have been pressing to expand its space for programs.
Whenever a public building is renovated, however, it must also be brought in compliance with the latest state building codes, a significant expense that cannot be avoided.
In the days leading up to its decision this week, the building committee had already narrowed its options for Town Hall to three: one in which the aging octagonal addition is preserved and two in which it is replaced with either a modest structure on the north side of Town Hall, or one somewhat larger.
Some members had been holding out for staying within the existing footprint of Town Hall. The current addition houses the Town Hall Meeting Room and two bathrooms on its first floor and a stage on its second. Preserving the addition would result in a loss of existing floor space since the building would have to make room for an elevator, stairs, and new handicapped-accessible toilets.
Committee member and contractor Lou Russo also argued that fixing the old addition would be throwing good money after bad. He said he had personally gone into the crawl space beneath the structure to examine its rubble foundation.
“What I saw is that this addition is not worth saving,” he told the committee.
But the clinching argument was the estimated expense, which showed that redoing the old addition was more expensive than at least one of the alternatives.
The numbers, Fair told a packed Town Hall Meeting Room, were only an approximation of the cost of construction, and did not include other expenses that must be added to the final project estimate, such as contingencies for unforeseen problems, cost escalators for inflation, as the economy recovers, and the so-called “soft costs” of furnishing and fitting out the building. Still, by estimating construction costs, LLB was able to show the relative differences to be expected among the three schemes. Here’s the breakdown:
- Scheme 1: Adding a “small” addition: $2.53 million, attached directly to Town Hall with an entrance on its northwest corner.
- Scheme 2: Adding a “larger” addition: $2.77 million, with a new glassed-in entrance located between the addition and Town Hall.
- Scheme 3: Renovating the existing building: $2.62 million.
In the discussion that preceded their vote, the committee members spoke unanimously in favor of the Scheme 2 layout, but preferred the cost of Scheme 3 and the size of Scheme 1 (all three are shown in the Town Hall drawings below).
Conceptual elevations by LLB Architects for the three Town Hall schemes discussed Thursday night, along with very rough estimates of the cost of building each of them.
The decision was to build a new addition, positioned next to Town Hall in the manner shown for Scheme 2. But the Municipal Building Committee committed, in its motion, to work hard to lower the cost of construction to the $2.6 million it would have cost to go with Scheme 3.
Co-Chair Wade Holtzman summed up the consensus. “We want Scheme 2 with a Scheme 3 price tag,” said. “We could call it Scheme 1.5.
“Or 1.6 or 1.7,” called someone from the crowd.
When asked, architect Fair said that once the other costs are added to the construction amounts, the total cost of any one of the schemes will likely to fall between $3.5 and $4.0 million, which is close to a capital request for Town Hall construction that the building committee submitted to the Capital Planning and Investment Committee this fall.
Earlier in the meeting, Fair also presented a more refined drawing for Hildreth House (see the illustration below), and an estimate that the cost of renovation and expansion would approximate $3.47 million, of which $1.43 million is the cost of the new addition alone.
LLB Architects presented this conceptual drawing of the Hildreth House Thursday night.
When it came time to make the motion, building committee co-Chair Pete Jackson worded the motion as a vote for Scheme 2, with a commitment by the committee to “work hard” to bring its construction costs close to the amount that would have been required to redo the old addition.
Selectman Ron Ricci told the group that the Board of Selectmen would “look favorably” on such a plan. At no time during the evening was there mention of the “statement of intent” of the Selectmen, though all members of that board, except Bill Johnson, were present for the meeting. Also present were the members of the Capital Planning and Investment Committee, candidates for the two vacant slots on the building committee, Finance Director Lorraine Leonard, and Town Administrator Tim Bragan.
Following the vote, the building committee and capital committees switched places, and capital committee chairman George McKenna reconvened his board from a meeting earlier that evening to quiz architect Fair and members of the building committee.
On Tuesday, Jan. 10, the Municipal Building Committee will take its recommendations to Selectmen for their approval.